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Cerebras doubles revenue, margin guidance drops stock
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems' debut earnings report delivered strong top-line growth, but an admission that it is renting its own chips back from a UAE customer to meet demand sent investors to the exit. Cerebras (NASDAQ: CBRS) posted revenue that almost doubled in the year to March, but warned margins would contract sharply in the current quarter, triggering a sell-off that wiped roughly US$5 billion from the stock in after-hours trade.First-quarter GAAP revenue came in at $193.4 million, up 94% year-on-year, with cloud and services revenue climbing 178%.Net loss narrowed to $14 million from $23.9 million, or 46 cents per share, a year earlier.The company reported a near break-even core non-GAAP operating loss of $3.5 million and a cash position of $3.3 billion in liquidity.Core gross margin is forecast to fall to between 36% and 38% in Q2, down from 46.5% in the first.During the analyst call, it emerged that Cerebras is temporarily renting its own systems back from an existing customer - believed by analysts on the call to be UAE-linked G42 - because it cannot build data centres fast enough to satisfy demand from its OpenAI and AWS partnerships. Wedbush, which holds an outperform rating on the stock,
Tech
Microsoft, Chevron ink West Texas data centre power deal
Microsoft and Chevron have inked a 20-year commercial agreement to power artificial intelligence infrastructure with the construction of a 2.7GW gas-fired power facility in West Texas known as Project Kilby in the Permian Basin. Kilby will deliver dedicated electricity to a new Microsoft-operated data centre by bypassing the regional grid.Project KilbyThe facility will burn locally sourced natural gas to provide base-load power, and when fully operational, the site will generate enough electricity to supply roughly two million homes. Chevron is partnering with investment firm Engine No. 1 and energy company Joulent to execute the Texas build, expected to cost around $7 billion, with Caterpillar and GE Vernova to supply the gas turbines required. The asset provides Chevron with cash flow separated from the standard fluctuations of global crude prices.Market and timelineMicrosoft needs to scale up compute infrastructure without relying on standard grid connection timelines, and by co-locating the power plant alongside the data centre, the companies are able to sidestep common transmission bottlenecks. A final investment decision from the Chevron board is scheduled for the end of 2026, with operations expected to commence
Tech
Alphabet slides 5% on AI leaks and surging capex
Tech juggernaut Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) dropped over 6% at Monday’s opening bell following high-profile executive departures to rival AI giants, rising infrastructure costs, and a cooling rocket market. The company slid to around US$343 per share in early trading, marking one of its sharpest single-session declines in a year. While the core business remains active - backed by a $460 billion contracted backlog in Google Cloud - near-term market sentiment turned cautious.Brain drain hits homeThe initial sell-off followed news of leadership shifts within the company's research divisions. Investors reacted to reports that John Jumper, Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google DeepMind, is leaving the firm to join competitor Anthropic. Jumper co-developed the AlphaFold protein-structure model, which earned him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His departure follows closely after another prominent artificial intelligence specialist, Noam Shazeer, returned to OpenAI. For an organization focused on scaling its Gemini and DeepMind systems, losing two cornerstones of its development team in a single week altered near-term projections.Capex spooks the herdRising infrastructure spending also influenced mar
Tech
Trump's Apple claim sends Intel stock to a record high
Intel shares climbed about 10% on Thursday after President Donald Trump claimed on his Truth Social network that the chipmaker had agreed to design and build processors for Apple inside the United States. The stock touched a record high of US$135.48 during the session before easing back, leaving Intel with a market value above $600 billion. "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America," Trump wrote in the post. He also accused earlier U.S. administrations of allowing Taiwan to capture the world's most advanced semiconductor production. Neither Intel nor Apple confirmed the arrangement or set out any terms, yet the claim follows months of speculation about a tie-up between the two companies. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Intel and Apple had reached a formal agreement, while an analyst note in December suggested Intel was well placed to manufacture Apple-designed chips for MacBooks and iPads from 2027. Apple dropped Intel processors several years ago in favour of its own custom silicon, which it has built almost entirely through Taiwan's TSMC. Shifting some of that work onshore would mark a meaningful change for a company long dependent on a single foreign supplier
Tech
Super Micro and Broadcom hit the same infrastructure wall
Tech giants Broadcom and Super Micro both posted record demand numbers inside a week of each other, yet both stocks sold off because of the same underlying margin misses. Two of the most closely tracked names in U.S. AI infrastructure posted strong demand figures in the same week, and the market sold both off for reasons that had nothing to do with their order books. Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) reported fiscal Q2 results on June 3, carrying record quarterly revenue of US$22.2 billion alongside a 143% year-on-year jump in AI semiconductor sales to $10.8 billion. Management raised its forward target to place the chipmaker on course for more than $100 billion in AI chip revenue by fiscal 2027, against a full-year guide of $56 billion for fiscal 2026. AVGO shares fell 12.6% in the following session, signalling that the guidance had landed short of what some investors had built into the price. Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI) followed on June 9 with a plan to raise $7 billion through equity and equity-linked financing to fund component purchases behind a server backlog worth roughly $39 billion, assembled from orders placed by more than 20 customers across a matter of weeks. Over two trading sessions, the stock shed ne

Tech
HPE posts record quarter; two years ahead of targets
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) reported a Q2 revenue of US$10.7 billion, a 40% jump year-on-year and the company's strongest top-line result since spinning out of Hewlett-Packard in 2015. Earnings beats were realised across every key financial metric:GAAP diluted EPS swung to $0.44 from a loss of $0.82 in the prior corresponding periodNon-GAAP diluted EPS came in at $0.79, above prior guidanceGAAP gross margin reached 36.5%, up 810 basis points year-on-year and 60 basis points sequentially, with non-GAAP gross margin at 36.9%Free cash flow was $915 million for the quarter, a $1.76 billion improvement from the negative $847 million posted in Q2 FY25, with the six-month position swinging from negative $1.72 billion to positive $1.62 billion year-on-year"HPE delivered an exceptional quarter with record-breaking revenue, higher-than-anticipated profitability, and increased free cash flow, reflecting strong execution and healthy demand across the business," President and CEO Antonio Neri said.Networking, cloud restructure the driversThe Networking division posted $2.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 148% year-on-year, with every sub-line expanding: Data Center Networking surged 233% to $320 million, Security rose 155%
Tech
Qualcomm signs ByteDance deal for AI data centre chips
Qualcomm has struck a deal to supply millions of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok, to support the Chinese company's AI agent software running across its data centre network, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither Qualcomm nor ByteDance offered comment when approached by reporters, leaving the financial terms and delivery timeline of the arrangement unconfirmed at the time of publication. The reported arrangement covers two distinct elements, with ByteDance set to purchase millions of Qualcomm ASICs to run its AI agent software workloads, positioning the TikTok owner as one of the chipmaker's earliest and most prominent buyers for that product line. A separate source said that the agreement also extends to chip manufacturing services, with Qualcomm assisting ByteDance in advancing a proprietary chip design that the Chinese company has already completed through the full production process.Amon's three-part chip roadmapAt last month's earnings call, CEO Cristiano Amon flagged that Qualcomm's data centre ambitions were on track, telling investors the company is in "a period of profound industry transformation" with a "leadi
Tech
Samsung workers walk off the job following pay dispute
Nearly 50,000 Samsung Electronics employees are set to walk off the job after efforts to clinch a deal on bonus payments fell through, threatening the health of South Korea’s economy and the global supply of semiconductors. According to the union leader, Choi Seung-ho, the 18-day strike would go ahead after management failed to come around on one remaining sticking point in government-mediated talks. "I want to make clear that we had accepted the final proposal presented by government mediator," he told reporters. "We express deep regret and feel disappointed, but the union plans to go ahead with the strike according to the law.” Samsung Electronics said the union insisted on “unacceptable demands” that included the size of bonuses for loss-making units. "The reason an agreement could not be reached .... is that accepting the labour ‌union's ⁠excessive demands would undermine the fundamental principles of company management," it said. The union had demanded that Samsung abolish a cap on bonuses at 50% of annual salaries, allocate 15% of annual operating profit to bonuses, and that these changes be formalised beyond one year. Over the weekend, South Korea’s government threatened to step in and order emergency
Tech
Burry warns AI-fuelled tech rally may crash
Legendary American hedge fund manager Michael Burry has recommended that investors reduce their exposure to technology stocks, which have surged in an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven rally he compared to the last stages of the dot-com market bubble. Burry, best known for predicting the 2008 United States housing market collapse portrayed in The Big Short film, reportedly said stock prices were rising simply because “they have been going straight up”. “An easier way for most is to simply reduce exposure to stocks, to tech stocks in particular. For any stocks going parabolic, reduce positions almost entirely,” Burry wrote in a post on the Substack online platform. He warned that stocks may be about to crash, according to this Reuters article, which quotes him writing: "The market has jumped the shark.” The founder of Scion Asset Management said investors should “reject greed” as enthusiasm about AI and momentum-driven trading lifted company valuations, according to this CNBC article. Burry said he had "a significant leveraged short position" against a portfolio he viewed as depressed and cheap. But betting against the rally through short selling was risky and impractical for most investors, particularly as bear